Cycling
'74 Assumes Publication and Devlopment of MAX
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| Max Boxed Software and example of a simple Max 'Patch' |
April 28, 2000
Cycling '74 today announced the conclusion of an agreement
with Gibson Guitar subsidiary Opcode Systems and the French music research institute
IRCAM in which Cycling '74 has acquired the publishing rights to MAX, the popular
graphical interactive programming environment for real-time music and multimedia.
MAX
was originally developed at IRCAM in the late 1980s by Miller Puckette and was
licensed to Opcode Systems in 1990, where Cycling '74 founder and President David
Zicarelli took the lead on its further development. Since its initial release,
MAX has been used extensively around the world in cutting-edge live performance,
multimedia development, and electronic music education. Cycling '74 has extended
and complemented MAX's MIDI and multimedia support with MSP, a set of synthesis
and signal processing extensions. "We've been developing Max and supporting
its community of users for quite a while," remarked Zicarelli. "Now
we can take the next step and transform MAX and MSP into cross-platform authoring
tools." The company has announced plans for a Windows version of MAX to be
released later this year.
Since Opcode Systems announced a restructuring
in 1999, Cycling '74 has been the sole sales and support channel for MAX. The
acquisition of MAX by Cycling '74 formalizes that role, and provides continuity
and support for the worldwide MAX user base. "We're excited that we could
make this move and believe that it can only strengthen Cycling '74's position
and offerings in the marketplace," commented Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.
"Ultimately, we're confident that the artists will be the ones who will benefit
most from this deal," he added.
"I've been hoping for years that,
somehow, David Zicarelli's company Cycling '74 would acquire Max. It's always
best for a piece of software to be controlled by the people who are actually writing
it," commented Miller Puckette (currently Professor of Music at the University
of California San Diego). "David understands and cares about how his decisions
affect the artists who use his work. At the same time he has good survival instincts."
"IRCAM sees a great opportunity to emphasize the current collaboration with
Cycling '74 towards porting MAX/MSP to new platforms in order to make IRCAM's
cutting edge DSP applications widely accessible and to increase complementarities
with IRCAM's Linux/GPL jMax environment," stated Vincent Puig, Director of
Marketing at IRCAM.
Cycling '74, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, develops,
distributes and supports music software for composers, artists, and producers.Cycling
'74 products include MSP, the Pluggo collection of MAX/MSP-based audio plug-ins,
the M interactive algorithmic composition program, and now MAX.
For more information, visit the Max web site
at: www.cycling74.com.
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